Sketchbook progress

I’ve made quite a mark on my Sketchbook Project book! Rather a lot of marks… in fact, disintegrating pages and unintentional upside down sketches and all sorts of stuff!

I started by stamping backgrounds on several pages, to get over the fear of marking the pristine white pages.

This one is actually a gold gocco print but it will do quite nicely as a background, too. My theme is lines and grids so there will be plenty of them.

I also did an image transfer of this inkjet print of a photo of reeds – lots of verticals and a few horizontal… This will provide some background as well for something on top. Not sure what yet but time will tell! This exercise showed me just how thin the paper is – as you can see, the pages are looking a bit distressed already! I think I’m going to run with this; most of my work is pretty distressed anyway. Or distressing… I have painted gesso on a few pages to see how that works out, and I plan to glue a few of the pages together rather than replace them completely with thicker art paper. Oh well, with one thing and another this will certainly look like a working sketchbook when it’s finished! I have already exploited the thin pages by making marks with my parallel pens on the reverse side of a sketch, which show nicely through the thin paper. I’ll try and remember to photograph that one next time. And I plan to layer some of the pages with polyester organza.

This is one of the sketches I’ve done already. I’m very into shadows at the moment, particularly over bridges and I like how the shadows from these girders on the footbridge almost form an enclosing tunnel. They interact with the corrugated metal sides to form grids.

This is a postcard sized piece of card which I think I’ll stick into the sketchbook later if I’m happy with it. I drew crayon lines on to the card before making an image transfer of another photo – this one is of the shadow cast by an iron fence. Not sure where I’m going with this yet and if it’ll end up in the book or not…

Thanks, Sheila. There are 80 pages (40 leaves) in the books, but some of them have perforations so you can tear them out. I have glued a couple of them together to make them thicker. You are also allowed to rebind them – Sue Bleiweiss has taken hers apart and put fabric pages inside! But I decided to treat mine more like a conventional sketchbook, although I wish the paper was thicker.

Keep in touch!

Here you can sign up for my newsletter, blog posts, Pinterest or Instagram feed

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Interested in receiving emails with...

my blog posts

my artist news

weekly

monthly

Hello. My name's Liz Plummer and I'm an artist based in Newport, South Wales, UK, working mostly with fabric. I love dyeing, printing, painting and stitching.
This blog is about the influences on my work, inspiration, my daily life,
and the processes of creating. Enjoy!